A brave Russian mod team has challenged themselves to port the whole of GSC's survival horror, STALKER, into Crysis' more advanced engine. The project's called Cryzone - Sector 23, and is far along enough for the team to have released a video of the mod in action. You'll find the video embedded below.

The mod is the work of a team called World of Stalker. It's still a work in progress, but famous elements from the STALKER series are already in there, including the bleak landscapes, anomalies, and groups of terse Russian men sitting around campfires.

The video shows off some of the destructability and improved physics that comes with the upgrade to Cryengine 2. The mod plans to add some new features to the game, including a Far Cry 2 style healing system, in which your character must fix wounds by injecting themselves, or removing bullets from wounds. For more information on the mod, check out the Sector 23 page on the AP forums. It's a staggering undertaking, but judging from the video below, the results could be pretty spectacular.

As a special New Year's Eve present, STALKER developers CDC have decided to release the full Software Development Kit for the X-ray 1.6 engine, the force behind the most recent STALKER game, Call of Pripyat. This is the first time fans have had access to fully featured mod tools for the latest STALKER game, and the new tools will give players the power to create whole single player and multiplayer missions. Check out the official STALKER site to get your hands on the new tools.

GSC have launched a competition asking entrants to design their own mission for STALKER 2. The best entries will be forwarded to the game's lead developers, and might even make it into the full game as a playable mission.

The competition is being run from the STALKER Facebook page, and asks participants to send in a description of the mission in a standard font, in less than half a page of A4. Here's what they're after, and what you stand to win:

Each entry must contain:

Quest name and description;
Mission details (what happened, what needs to be done);

"Contest benefits: The names of the contest winners will be included in the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-2 credits. The best ideas from the contest may be implemented in the new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. This said, the developers retain the right to change the quest looks or implementation, while preserving the key author's idea."

There's a short list of rules on the Facebook page, asking players not to submit entries that "have nothing to do with the subject matter" and are "obviously impossible to implement", which quickly put pay to my "radioactive power plant that hides secret T-Rex" idea. In bonus bizzaro news, it looks as though GSC want to expand beyond their recently teased TV show, and break into fashion, with this clothing line. Is post apocalyptic chic the next big thing?

The grim survival horror series, STALKER is getting its very own TV series. It's set in the Zone, and will feature many of the things that made STALKER great, like dark radioactive tunnels, deadly anomolies, and lots of angry men shouting at each other in Russian. You'll find the trailer embedded below.

The game was based on an Andrei Tarkovsky film, in turn based on an Arkady Strugatsky novel called Roadside Picnic, which makes this a TV show of a game of a film of a book. There aren't many mediums left for STALKER to conquer, but an opera set in the Zone seems like an obvious next step. For more information and a few images from the set, the STALKER teaser site is live. Meanwhile, here's the trailer.